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When I was younger, my father, who was (and still is) a Hudson River painting collector/dealer, tried desperately to expose me to as many different things as possible and is probably the main reason that I am the collector/hoarder that I am today. I do greatly enjoy and respect the luminescent pastorals that the Hudson River School had to offer and hung from time to time in my house, but at the same time, they were not the types of paintings that I saw myself owning and hanging in my own house.

One evening, my father, as he was wont to do, asked me to review a Sotheby’s catalog with him in our living room at home. There were a number of Hudson River School paintings of interest that were up for auction, but as he continued to flip through, something caught my eye. It was a lithograph of Bellows’ “Preliminaries (to the Big Bout)” (1916).